It is a well known fact that the pace of modern day life is fast and often leaves people with no time to shop, collect their deliveries, do their laundry, or simply meet one another to hand over personal items. This has led many people to turn to services that give them more time and convenience. One of the services that are increasingly popular is the ordering of goods to be delivered to the user's place of residence. These days, all types of goods can be ordered and delivered. For instance, many department stores have catalogues where virtually every item sold in the stores can be ordered by mail. Even businesses that traditionally did not previously make regular deliveries such as the groceries or laundries are now offering a delivery service. People are also turning to personal concierge services to perform errands such as delivery, returns or pick up items for them during their working hours simply because they do not have the time.
Although the convenience of having an item delivered to a desired location as opposed to traveling to the place where that item is sold is desirable, receiving the item can be a problem. This is because someone has to be physically present at the desired location to receive the item and this may not be possible for some people in various situations. For example, home occupants that are not at home during office hours are likely to find delivery or pickup of items at such hours inconvenient or uncomfortable to use. Hence, the delivery of goods in existing delivery and pickup systems can be improved to accommodate such situations. (The terms ‘pickup’ and ‘returns’ are used interchangeably.)
Most existing delivery and pickup systems focus solutions to the above problem by using of one or more electronically-controlled lockers to facilitate the delivery and pickup of goods. These lockers are placed either outside homes or at common areas serving more than one apartment block where there is high human traffic. In some cases, these lockers are stand-alone systems that serve only specific merchants or users. In some of these systems, the lockers are communicatively linked to a central controller that is shared by a variety of merchants and users. Notification messages are transmitted to the receiving party to inform them of the need to pick up their deliveries.
Common among most existing delivery and pickup systems is the need for either a delivery party or a receiving party or both parties to be registered with the central controller prior to using such systems. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,053 Porter, codes associated with a vendor, a delivery person and a customer have to be stored in a storage device prior to delivery and pickup in which these codes are required. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,053 Porter, both the vendor and the customer must first be registered with a central controller so that their respective codes are made available to the storage device. In the transaction-oriented electronic accommodation system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,116,506 Matsumoto et al and U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,971 Matsumoto et al, both assigned to Hitachi Ltd., all users or addressees must be registered with the system before deliveries can be made. Also, only registered or authorized vendors or delivery persons can make deliveries or perform pickups from storage devices of the system. Access to the system is done using access codes or personal identification numbers (PIN) assigned when they are registered with the system.
Registration of vendors, delivery agents and their delivery persons may seem to be an insignificant procedure. However, for large companies with many delivery persons making many different deliveries each day, this can be quite challenging. For example, a post office may have several thousand postmen making deliveries and every one of them have to be registered with a unique code. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,053, the codes have to be stored in the storage device. Although only codes for delivery persons who cover the area of the storage device need to be stored, high turnover of delivery persons and frequent changing of delivery routes makes the administration of such codes complex and tedious.
For the systems described above, registration of users is ideal but not always practical. Users who receive deliveries or make returns regularly generally find it easy to remember their codes or PINs to make collections. However, in most cases, users tend to receive deliveries once in a while. While these users may register to use a system for the first time, such users may forget their codes or PINs the next time they want to use the system. A user in such a situation generally does not use the system or may register again by creating another account. Duplication of registration details is not desirable because the system then has to create and maintain accounts that may not be used more than once and that then become what are known as “dead accounts”. In most cases, during registration, users would also provide the system with information on how they can be notified when there is an item or goods to be picked up. This can be in the form of an email address or a mobile phone number. However, managing such information is troublesome, especially when users change their email addresses or mobile phone numbers.
In the systems described above, the assumption is that both the delivery party and the receiving party are aware of and want to use such systems for deliveries. A user normally initiates this by indicating a delivery to be made to a specified storage device. Instructions are then recorded in a delivery note so that a delivery person knows that the delivery is to be made to the storage device. However, in delivering goods to people who are not at home and are not registered to use such systems, a delivery person has to make at least one more trip to complete a delivery even if storage devices of such systems are located nearby. In this case, the delivery person is unable to take advantage of such systems due to a lack of information such as, for example, whether a person is registered to use a system and particulars of that person.
In most existing delivery and pickup systems, some Identification card (IC Card) is used as a credentialing means at a storage device. While this is widely accepted, it creates a problem when the IC card is lost, spoilt or cancelled. For example, when a user decides to cancel a credit card registered for use in a delivery and pickup system, he then has to register a cancellation of the credit card with the system and provide information for a replacement card. This can be a tedious process that is undesirable.
Although many existing delivery and pickup systems have been developed, such systems do not adequately address the above problems. Therefore, what is needed is a delivery and pickup system that keeps track of all transactions and transacted parties, reports status of these transactions and intelligently keeps payment data relating to the transactions. Such a system should also be reliable, safe and convenient to use. Furthermore, the delivery and pickup system should preferably not require user registration or users to have prior knowledge of the system. In addition, the delivery and pickup system should be able to provide all relevant parties automated notification of a delivery in a convenient manner. Such a delivery and pickup system is currently not available.